Creative Writing Commons^™

A Presence Of P____ And W__Th, Riley Wilson

Masters Theses

This body of work examines the involvement of association as it relates to our cultural interpretations of natural phenomena. Flowers and animals, both real and imagined, have been used as symbols for human morality since the beginning of human history. Two sources with which I drew inspiration from are medieval bestiaries and the Victorian practice of flower language. By combining elements from these references, I aim to pair this idea about the human need for classification with my own considerations about my identity. In combination, I also aim to highlight the responsibility that is intrinsic to curiosity. When faced with …

Fever Dive: A Novel, Sofia Ohrynowicz

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This is the craft reflection, prologue, and first five chapters of Fever Dive, a novel in progress.

The Pinocchio Boy: A Collection Of Queer Creative Written Work, Lucas Olvera

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The Pinocchio Boy is a series of short stories/memoirs and poems about my experiences as a Transgender and Gay man. Structured in five parts, I explore my childhood, young adulthood, and adulthood. My collection offers me an insight into what made me who I am today. There are drastic tonal shifts between the poem segments and the memoirs, I intended to act as the narrator of my story in which the poems and dialogue act as the characters in motion and the memoirs as my direct narration. A tongue-in-cheek fairy tale tone, but coming from a sincere place. My intent …

“The Urgent Necessity For More Original Creative Works By Transgender And Gender Expansive Artists" Is Not The Title Of My Thesis., Alicia Fireel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a mix of personal reflection, academic research, and an examination of The Girl Crazy Queer and Other Fairy Tales, a play I wrote and performed in October of 2023, co-produced by The University of Louisville’s Department of Theatre Arts and Pandora Productions, a Louisville-based theatre company dedicated to Queer theatre. This thesis and the play mirror each other; both contemplate Queer experiences, Queer histories, Queer trauma, and Queer stories. In the thesis I accomplish this through examining four subjects: myself, my play, the connection between modes of storytelling and aspects of transgender Queerness, and the perils that …

Picture Me Like This: A Short Story Collection, Anna Jones

Scripps Senior Theses

Picture Me Like This is a short story collection that explores our racialized imaginations surrounding Blackness and whiteness, and the implications those have for our intimacies with each other.

Growing Up Butchona On The Texas-Mexico Border A Marimacha Memoir, Julietta Rivera

Theses and Dissertations

Growing Up Butchona on the Border is a queer, Latina memoir that takes place on the Texas-Mexico border. This thesis is a journey in words and pictures that spans throughout an immigration crisis, a worldwide pandemic and the fallout that follows a world-wide lockdown; eventually leading down the rocky road to self-discovery. The thesis opens with a fictional account of Torita Torcida, a seven-year-old Honduran immigrant that makes her way across the Texas-Mexico border with her mother only to be ripped away from her when the truck they were smuggled in is seized by border patrol. Images and words come …

To Want Too Much: Poems, Jacob Phillips

Graduate Masters Theses

This collection of poems captures a contemporary lived experience and moment by documenting, engaging with, and annotating upon feelings of modernity, present and emerging technologies, mysticism and spirituality, and intersections with present-day social order and issues. Equal parts recording and response, this thesis is response to the strange and precarious precipice of a contemporary life, this state of being alive and always on verge of something new, something beautiful, something futuristic, fantastical, dangerous, decisive, absurd, magical. It is the poet coming to terms with his own identity, queerness, and role within a world marked by the dichotomy of extremity and …

La Tela, Un Fluir, Hugo Javier Moreno

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Tesis para Escritura Creativa. Un libro de poesía. No se requiere abstracto.

Horse Loose: Essays On Fear And Attachment, Alyse Burnside

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

I began writing my thesis about my grandmother, who lived out the last few years of her life as a new age healer speaking in tongues and believing she was the channel for an ancient Lemurian shaman. We were not close until the very end of her life, and even then I felt far away from her. Not in the least because of her estrangement with the rest of my family. I tried and tried to write about her but always ran up against her mystery. She was not a woman many knew, and if you did know her, you …

The Godshard's Word, Ari Mackoff

Senior Projects Spring 2022

A kabbalistic, speculative novella that loosely reimagines the biblical Jonah story, set in the mid-1500s in a world with an alternate gender framework. Explores concepts of Jewish textuality and canonizing, and the pushback against the divine call that characterizes certain Tanakhic figures.

Spectrum Of Shit, Hannah Hiaasen

Theses and Dissertations

Contending with the loss of a parent to a mass shooting in their workplace, a newsroom, I find myself suspended in time, in an office. Post-its, fans, button-ups, snow globes, clipboards, reporters notebooks, scrap paper, jot downs, keyboards hold me up. I crave the comfort of repetitive cumulative hand work. Quilting, weaving, and cutting away help me breathe, haptically process and memorialize these grieving objects, this grieving person. Weed-wacking towards intimacy, my work employs a range of materials to mourn the mundanity of a workday, fantasize transformative justice, and steward embodied grief to the surface. My only speed is slow-- …

Signs To Stop, Finn Tait

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Take this as a Sign-

At night it is so much easier to believe a story. There is a forgiveness at night, an expanding of what might be possible. I first learned how to tell stories in the dark, from listening to my dad's voice as I drifted off to sleep, from the whispered voices of my friends around a fire, from the car tape player on a long drive home. It is easy to imagine that something terrible stands just beyond the headlight's reach, looks back at you from your dark bathroom mirror, or lurks just behind your bedroom …

This Is The Sky That I See, Gavin T. Mckenzie

Senior Projects Spring 2022

This is the sky that I see, a Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College, reflects the power we hold in defining and redefining spaces, and how ordinary places can be reimagined for the Othered body. I produced this show to allow the characters to shape and decide their worlds, centering on their relationships and feelings. This is the sky that I see establishes a completely queer world that centers Queer joy and friendship.

Party Of Immortals, Hyazinth S. Baumann

Senior Projects Spring 2022

I am the cook of a queer kitchen for characters. Who wants to come out? Where’s the seasoning? So far I’ve had a nonbinary Hebrew angel, a trans Dionysus, a drag dragon, and an agender winter spirit inhabit my physical form. Each mythic persona is meant to serve a new dish on the table. Lailah externalizes her/my spiritual awakening. Dionysus realizes his/my ideals of re-normalizing nudity. Darastrix serves in reaction to the history of womanhood and investigates the strange and magical beginnings of her/my childhood. Perchta practices durational performance and processes its/my Austrian heritage.

Zines are self-produced, self-published bodies of …

Queering Job: Inverted Liberation In Boy Erased And Other Conversion Trauma Narratives, Harrison Beau Palen

MSU Graduate Theses

This thesis explores conversion trauma narratives with the goal of transforming—inverting The Book of Job’s holy resolution to instead entail queer liberation apart from Evangelicalism. Analyzing Conley’s bestselling memoir, Boy Erased, I discuss Conley’s suffering and how his liberation is not found by means of repressing or converting his attraction to the same gender. I also analyze Emily Danforth’s novel, The Miseducation of Cameron Post to highlight how fictional accounts of queer liberation from conversion therapy help to increase awareness of the harms of conversion therapy. Throughout my thesis, I incorporate my own story of queer suffering, survival, and …

Some (Im)Material Girls, Living In (Im)Material Worlds, With Seeds, Stars, And Shit, Matthew Weiderspon

Theses and Dissertations

This writing situates material and gestural vocabularies cultivated in my artwork in relation to my lived experience; primarily my rural upbringing in Colorado. Scattered floor dispersals, calling sounds, and bodily movements desire reconsiderations of hope in precarity through a disorientation of place, association, scale, and language.

Already An Archaeobotany, Sydney Britsch

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Steven Universe once sang, “I learned to stay true to myself/ by watching myself die.” This is precisely the natural journey we must all embark upon in this life; our self continually returning, remembering that which we can trust our bodies have known all along: we are not actually separate from this thing we’ve called nature. This ever-opening landscape necessitates fluidity and the recognition of other modes of knowledge and connection, sometimes only sound or space as our guide. A place where self-healing and self-sacrifice is simultaneously enacted. Each of these moments reverberates and affects the universal voice. The earth …

The Gender Epidemic: Intersecting Disease, Gender, And Sexuality In A Graphic Novel, Autumn Cejer

All NMU Master's Theses

For my thesis, I wrote a graphic novel set in a world where certain people possess powers that society tries to suppress by viewing them as a disease. The story focuses on two super-powered individuals on opposite sides of the law who handle this oppression very differently. Although these characters would easily be able to overpower the non-powered people in charge, they are too afraid to do so. Internalized guilt from possessing abilities they did not ask for adds an additional layer of conflict, just as women and disabled persons are constantly made to feel like they should apologize for …

Once Upon A Re-Imagined Time: A Series Of Lgbtqiap+ Fairytales, Elizabeth Groth

Honors Projects

: Is it possible to merge the genres of LGBTQ+ literature and fairytales? How would one go about doing it in a way that doesn’t perpetuate stereotypes? Is it possible to convey those positive LGBTQ+ messages in a way that is accessible to an eight to twelve age range? Which LGBTQ+ groups would benefit the most from this representation? Why are stories like this necessary in a society that is becoming progressively more accepting of the LGBTQ+ community (and other minority communities) on its own? Is there an added benefit to including characters of other marginalized communities within these stories …

The Car Ride Home, Jonathan Rivera

English Honors Theses

The Car Ride Home explores the coming of age of a young boy into a queer man, searching and sifting through the trauma of home life, and realizing his mother’s addiction affects more than just herself, but an entire family. This realization coincides with views of masculinity, as he carefully watches the men around him. He internalizes these depictions of masculinity when exploring his own confusion and investigation of his own sexual identity and queerness. The poetry collection is broken up into two connected parts. Part one explores the illusion of childhood and nostalgia while introducing subtle glimpses and secrets …

I Can Speak For You, Tchad Kayla Ross

Senior Projects Fall 2021

This novella is about a queer Caribbean- American young woman named Nessa struggling with her relationship with her mother. A death occurs that leads Nessa to discover her mother may not be who she previously thought she was. This coming of age story confronts the delayed state of self actualization that occurs when Caribbean culture meets queer identity.

A Nameless Blue, Francis (Elle) Lawson Mitchell

Senior Projects Spring 2021

A Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College, Written Arts. A science fiction novel about queerness, disability, the heart and the body. The novel considers where the biological and the mechanical meet, and where the body intersects with relationships of power, the state, production and religion.

Collective Healing Within Queer Paradoxes: Deconstructing Emotional Abuse In Lgbtq2sia* Communities To Cultivate More Accountable And Compassionate Worlds, Alexia Siebuhr

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Emotional abuses within LGBTQ2SIA* communities are rarely acknowledged as existing or often normalized. Through care and anti-oppression works, transformative justice models such as community and self-accountability have helped carve out ways of addressing harm directly and breaking cycles of violence. The research in this thesis has been through mixed qualitative methodologies including semi-structured interviews and surveys. The participants' along with other authors, artists, activists and scholars’ narratives draws upon the experiences of emotional abuse lived within structural and social surveillance. The settler colonial state sanctioned projects have responded to harm by perpetuating violence upon those most marginalized. Deconstructing emotional abuse …

Traumatic Experiences Through The Queer Lens, Holden Guckenberg

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This is a collection of short stories based off of real trauma that LGBTQ+ individuals have experienced. I have interviewed seven people who identify within the LGBTQ+ community and listened to their traumatic stories. Based on their stories, I have written their accounts with trauma while expanding and taking creative freedom to better enunciate and bring-forth their stories. Trauma affects the LGBTQ+ community at a greater height than it does the general population. It’s important to recognize this fact so that we can support those people who have faced tremendous adversity in the form of trauma. In one form or …

Silver, Blood And Singing, Zachary J. Posey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Silver, Blood and Singing is a novel that is an exploration of the blurred lines between science fiction and fantasy in which the concepts of grief and mourning are explored. This thesis consists of a novel following two sisters and those around them as they try to come to terms with their grief. Along this journey they end up being opened up to worlds more dangerous and stranger than any they have come across before. As they explore these new worlds this functions as a place to examine the understanding of what it means to be a person and how …

The Natural Mother Of The Child, Krys Belc

All NMU Master's Theses

The Natural Mother of the Child is a memoir-in-essays about Belc’s experiences as a transmasculine birth parent. These essays use text and images to explore parenting on the margins of both motherhood and fatherhood. They also examine the ways in which legal and identity documents are limiting in their ability to describe gender and family. Topics explored include pregnancy, birth, lactation, masculinity, top surgery, medical transition, the meaning of biological relationships between parents and children, and microaggressions against transgender people.

All That You Say Is Beautiful: Stories, Omaria Sanchez Pratt

Theses and Dissertations--English

From the city of High Point to New York City, this collection portrays a certain black experience. Through a sociological lens, the stories in All That You Say is Beautiful study intersections of class, race, family, and sexuality by bending forms, expectations, and seeks to understand what it means to be human when your experience is not that of mainstream American culture.

A Spectacle And Nothing Strange, Taylor Z. King

Theses and Dissertations

Working through methods of abstraction and comedic mimicry I choreograph awkwardly balanced sculpture with objects of adornment as a means to defuse personal sensitivities surrounding my experiences of gender, desire, and home. The research that follows is concerned with the adjacent, the in between, above and underneath, because I feel that this kind of looking means that you are, to some degree, aware of what lies at the edges. Maybe this is what Gertrude Stein means to act as though there is no use in a center—because this concerns a way of relating, though there are many things in the …

Private Rainbows, Mikey F. Estes

Theses and Dissertations

I make art that refers to how the self is mediated through structures, objects, and images — a kind of self-portraiture that circles around its subject, reflecting a state of simultaneous formation and disintegration. Over the past few years, I have used my iPhone as a tool to make images of everyday life. As the user of this device, I am defined by both my presence and absence. I am interested in the process of locating the self within the scattered yet ordered space of the screen.

Care Forgotten, James M. Norris

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.